All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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I like most of your outline, especially the performance chapter, but the chapter about TIE, AUTOLOAD, source filters, symbol tables, and type globs looks like the script of a horror movie to me. These are things that I expect mature coders to understand and almost totally avoid. I suppose they have to learn them somewhere though. I do like the part about error handling. Many perl coders I meet don't have much knowledge about this.

I'm not sure what constitutes mastery, and it's something that I have to define. However, getting through the book won't make anyone a Perl master. I want to teach how to master Perl, meaning that once they've gone through the book they should be able to answer their own questions. That's a hard thing to show in the outline because it comes in bits and pieces in all of the other topics.I also avoid subjects covered much better in other books (so maybe I should have a chapter on other books). Perl Best Pract

Here are two things I think would be interesting: First, while it is
a bit far afield, a historical chapter describing Perl 5's roots in
Perl 4 and also in C, sed, and awk would be interesting. I think part
of mastering Perl is understanding why it is the way it is, and I
think an evolutionary account would supply much enlightenment.
This seems even more useful for people coming from a non-Unix
background, who may lack the natural instinct for small composable
scripts and one-liners.

For the Other Books section, good, you have Damian's PBP [isbn.nu] @ORA [oreilly.com]of course. You should add Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions [isbn.nu] @ORA [oreilly.com]; is a 3rd edition planned or needed of that?

Draft Proposal comments:

Perl Context: Want.pm [cpan.org] has more varieties of context than the outline.

4 programming models - isn't OO in the list? That would be 5. Surely the OO in Alpaca/Intermediate hasn't finished the discussion of OO. Mastering should discuss the grand matters of tas